ISRAEL LOVES anniversaries. The media fill up with revelations and memories of
the event commemorated, eye-witnesses recite their stories for the umpteenth
time, old photos flood the pages and the TV screens.

In the coming days, two main memorial dates will play this role. True, the Yom
Kippur war broke out only in October (1973), but already the newspapers and TV
programs are full of it.

The Oslo agreement was signed on September 13 (1993). Hardly any mention. It has
been almost expunged from the national memory.

Oslo? Oslo in Norway? Anything happened there? Tell me about it.

ACTUALLY, FOR me the historic date is September 10. On that day, Yitzhak Rabin
and Yasser Arafat exchanged letters of mutual recognition.

The State of Israel recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as
the representative of the Palestinian people, and the PLO recognized the State
of Israel.

It is one of the historic achievements of Oslo that today nobody can possibly
grasp the immensity of this recognition.

The Zionist movement aimed officially at the establishment of a homeland for the
Jewish people in Palestine. Unofficially, it wanted to turn Palestine – all of
it - into a Jewish State. Since Palestine was already inhabited by another
people, the existence of this people – as a people – had to be denied. Since the
Zionist movement was, in its own eyes, a moral and idealistic endeavor, this
denial was a basic tenet of the Zionist creed. A land without a people for a
people without a land. Golda Meir famously declared that there was “no such
thing as a Palestinian people.” I myself have spent hundreds, perhaps thousands
of hours of my life trying to convince Israeli audiences that there really
exists a Palestinian nation.

And here was the Prime Minister of Israel signing a document that recognized the
existence of the Palestinian People, demolishing
a central pillar of Zionism after almost a hundred years.

Yasser Arafat's declaration was no less revolutionary. For every Palestinian, it
was a fundamental truth that the Zionist state was the illegitimate child of
Western imperialism. Palestine was an Arab land, inhabited by Arabs for many
centuries, until a bunch of foreign settlers took it over by force and guile,
expelled half its population and terrorized the rest.

And here was the founder and leader of the Palestinian liberation movement
accepting Israel as a legitimate state!

Recognition of this kind cannot be taken back. It is a fact in the minds of
millions of Israelis and Palestinians, and of the world at large. This is the
basic change forged in Oslo.

FOR THE vast majority of Israelis, Oslo is dead. Their
story is quite simple: we signed a generous agreement. And “the Arabs” broke it,
as they always do. We did everything possible for peace, we let the devious
Arafat come back into the country, we even gave
arms to his security forces – and what did we get? Not peace. Just terrorist
attacks. Suicide bombers.

The lesson? The Arabs don’t want peace. They want to throw us into the sea. As
Yitzhak Shamir put it so succinctly: “The Arabs are still the same Arabs, and
the sea is still the same sea.”

For many Palestinians, of course, the lesson is the very reverse. The Oslo
agreement was a cunning Zionist trick to continue the occupation in another
form. Indeed, the situation of the Palestinians under occupation
became much worse. Before Oslo, Palestinians
could move freely throughout the country from the Mediterranean Sea to the
Jordan River, from Nablus to Gaza, from Haifa to Jericho, from everywhere to
Jerusalem. After Oslo, this became impossible.

SO WHAT is the truth? Is Oslo dead?

Of course not.

The most important creation of the Oslo agreement, the Palestinian Authority, is
very much alive, though not kicking.

One may think about the Authority what one wants, good or bad, but it certainly
is there. It is recognized by the international community as a state in the
making, attracting donations and capital. It is the visible embodiment
of the Palestinian national presence.

In spite of the all-pervading oppression by the military occupation regime,
there is a dynamic, vital, self-governing Palestinian society in both the West
Bank and in the Gaza Strip, enjoying wide international support.

On the other hand, peace seems far, far away.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER the signing of the agreement (called the “Declaration of
Principles”) on the White House lawn, we convened a large meeting in Tel Aviv
for the peace forces to discuss its merits.

None of us had any illusions. It was a bad agreement. As Arafat put it: “the
best possible agreement in the worst possible situation.” Not an agreement
between equals, but between a strong military power and a small, almost
helpless, occupied people.

Some of us proposed condemning the agreement outright. Others, including myself,
proposed accepting it conditionally. “The actual paragraphs are less important,”
I said, “The main thing is the peace dynamic set in motion.” Today I am not
certain that I was right, but neither am I sure that I was wrong. The jury is
still out.

THE MAIN fault in the agreement was that its ultimate aim was not stated.While it seemed obvious to the Palestinians (and to many Israelis) that
the aim was to pave the way to peace between the State of Israel and the
soon-to-be-established State of Palestine, this was not clear at all to the
Israeli leadership.

It was an interim agreement – but interim to what? If you want to go from Berlin
to Paris, the interim stations are quite different from those you pass on the
way from Berlin to Moscow.

Without agreement on the final destination, a quarrel was bound to break out
about every single station on the way. The mood of reconciliation quickly
changed into distrust on both sides. It went sour almost right from the
beginning.

One can compare Rabin to a general who has succeeded in breaking through the
lines of his opponent. A general in such a situation should not stop to think
things over. He should rush forward and throw everything he has got into the
breach. But Rabin did stop, allowing all the forces of opposition in Israel to
gather, regroup and start a fatal counterattack.

By nature, Rabin was no revolutionary. On the contrary, he was a rather
conservative type, a military man with not much imagination. By exercising sheer
logic, he had arrived at the conclusion that it was in the best interest of
Israel to make peace with the Palestinians (a conclusion I had arrived at 44
years earlier, treading the same path.) At the age of 70, he changed his whole
outlook. For this he deserves much respect.

But once there, he hesitated. As the Germans say, he had Angst at his own
courage. Instead of rushing forward, he haggled at length over every detail even
while an intense fascist-type propaganda campaign was let loose against him. For
this he paid with his life.

SO WHO broke the agreement first? I would blame my own side.

It was Rabin who proclaimed that “there are no sacred dates!” (To which I
responded “I wish he would convince my bank manager of that.”) Breaking dates
set down in a contract means breaking the contract. The timetable for starting
the serious negotiations for final peace was ignored, and so of course was the
date set for the conclusion: 1999. By that time, nobody was even thinking about
Oslo any longer.

Another fateful violation was the failure to set up
the “four safe passages” between the West Bank and the Gaza strip. In the
beginning, road signs saying “To Gaza” were indeed set up on the road from
Jericho to Jerusalem, but no passage was ever opened.

The result of this became apparent only much later, when Hamas assumed power in
the isolated Gaza Strip, while Fatah clung to in the West Bank. It was “divide
et impera” at its best (or worst).

In the agreements following Oslo, the occupied West Bank was divided into
temporary zones, A, B and C. Area C was to remain for the time being under
complete Israeli control. Soon enough it became clear that Israeli military
planners had devised the map carefully: Area C included all the main roads and
the sites earmarked for Israeli settlements.

The people who devised all these things did not have peace on their mind.

The picture is not altogether one-sided. During the Oslo period Palestinian
armed attacks on Israelis did not cease. Arafat did not initiate them, but
neither did he go out of his way to prevent them. He probably thought that they
would needle the Israelis into going ahead with implementing the agreement. They
had the opposite effect.

THE ASSASSINATIONS of Rabin and Arafat put an end to Oslo for all practical
purposes. But reality has not changed.

The considerations which led Arafat by the end of 1973 to conclude that he must
negotiate with Israel, and which led Rabin in 1993 to talk with the
Palestinians, have not changed.

There are two nations in this country, and they must choose: to live together or
to die together. I hope they choose life.

Some day, public squares in Tel Aviv and Ramallah will be named for this
agreement. And in Oslo, too, of course.